Journey Of Pride

A Group Of South Florida Veterans Travels 18 Hours By Bus To Washington, D.c. For A Historic Dedication.

May 28, 2004|By Diane C. Lade Staff writer

Eager to put the Great Depression behind them, they rushed toward their destiny on buses, on trains, on ocean liners, even on foot if they didn't have the money for a ticket. They were young, and they traveled light.

A class photo. A lock of their sweetheart's hair. A pair of boxing gloves. These were the things they carried from home to boot camp and across the sea as they headed out to save the world.

"When I joined up, my father said, `Son, I'm proud of you. But I'm never going to see you again,'" recalled Frank Laiacona, of Plantation, who was so small he barely qualified for officer's school when he joined the Army in late 1941.

He packed his newly tailored uniform and a black rosary given to him by his priest, then took a train to California, a boat to the Philippines -- where, within a year, he found himself a prisoner of the Japanese, watching his captors bayonet men who stumbled as they marched nonstop for 10 days up the Bataan Peninsula.

His father was proved right. Laiacona came back, weighing only 62 pounds, but his dad had died in his absence.

Six decades later, Laiacona and 19 other South Florida men and women, all World War II veterans, set off again Thursday. They weren't heading out to meet the war that shaped them, but to remember it and the lives it claimed. Their chartered bus is scheduled to pull into Washington, D.C., about noon today after an 18-hour overnight trip to the National World War II Memorial dedication weekend.

In a way, it's a journey back to a more straightforward time for them, and the nation: before heart attacks and widowhood, before Vietnam and Iraq.

"It was a time when we were all innocent kids. We were all so young," said Marion Burnard, 83, who lives west of Boynton Beach.

Burnard was restless and bored when she said "yes" to the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942. She spent the next two years in an Indiana military hospital as a surgical assistant tending to men mangled by the war.

The vets on the bus are old now, and no longer travel light. The bus luggage compartment was rearranged to accommodate two wheelchairs. Amanda McConner, a former counselor for a Broward County veteran's center and one of the trip organizers, repeatedly reminded travelers to take their medications.

Dr. Enrique Aguilar, the center's associate chief of staff for geriatrics and extended care, acknowledged that an extended bus trip would be tough on the old soldiers and sailors.

"But they have coped with so many different things in their lives, I think they will be strong," he said. "Finally, they are getting some recognition for the sacrifice they went through."

Laiacona, 85, just had a tumor the size of a paperback book removed from his chest. The incision had started bleeding several days before the trip, after he fell while trying to adjust the U.S. flag that flies perpetually outside his front door.

"But I can make it, I can make it. This is going to be something big and I want to be there," Laiacona insisted. Tucked inside the bag he put on the bus was the black rosary that, like him, survived three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. As he worked the rice fields, Laiacona would say the same litany he does today: "I can make it. I can make it."

Tear-filled eyes

Fifty veterans from all wars, some accompanied by family members, filed slowly onto the bus late Thursday, taking the medical release forms the organizers handed out.

Like a proud parent seeing a child off to summer camp, Stephanie Leigh lingered outside the bus, spying through the window as her father, 81-year-old Navy veteran Leo Leibowitz, settled in.

"When I was growing up, he rarely talked about the war. But as he gets older, I am hearing more stories," said Leigh, a high school principal in Miami-Dade County. Her eyes filled with tears as she waved a small U.S. flag, watching the bus pull away.

About 200,000 people are expected in Washington for the weekend, which will culminate with the memorial's dedication on Saturday. Many will be from Florida, home to about 500,000 World War II vets and the state with the highest percentage of veterans over age 65.

From the moment they marched home almost 60 years ago, the 15.5 million who made it were greeted with parades and treated with patriotic respect. The 3.5 million left today have been dubbed "the greatest generation."

But while monuments to less popular wars have filled Washington's Mall, there has been nothing there for World War II. Until now.

"It's about time. I'm anxious to look at it," said Lawrence Makler, 84. He boarded the bus carrying his favorite hat: a black baseball cap emblazoned with a red numeral one, the sign of the Army First Infantry Division, known as the Big Red One.

Makler, who saw 443 consecutive days of action that included the D-Day invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, never misses a division reunion.